School districts should be careful not to craft policies that discourage free expression

Had I gone through middle school today, rather than during the dark ages of the 1970’s, there’s a good chance I would have been expelled, or quite possibly even imprisoned or institutionalized. Oh, not for anything I actually did, but for what I wrote.

By sixth grade I had left juvenile fiction behind, plunging headlong into the books that lined my parents shelves. I devoured authors and their oeuvres whole, starting with Kurt Vonnegut and moving on to J.P. Dunleavy, Philip Roth, and J.D. Salinger, before an astute clerk at a local bookstore directed me to the short stories of Harlan Ellison and a decade long passion for “speculative fiction.” I’m not sure I understood all of what I read — in fact, from subsequent re-readings, I know I didn’t — but there’s no doubt these authors had a huge impact on me and my writing, especially the numerous short stories I churned out between seventh and ninth grades, most of which remained unread by any eyes but my own.

I’d always had a taste for the absurd and the macabre, and inspired by the likes of Vonnegut and Ellison (not to mention the adolescent hormones running through my veins) my own stories sometimes tended toward the violent and the bizarre. While some stories were more mundane, others dwelled on murder, suicide and meticulously descriptive narrative of gruesome deaths, all juxtaposed against the banal routines of everyday life… in short, the ravings of an obviously disturbed child.

Except, I wasn’t disturbed. At least no more than your typical, suburban 14-year-old. No, in retrospect, what I was engaging in was a healthy cathartic outlet in which I could channel all my frustration, rage, depression, confusion, mania and whatever into brutal but harmless fiction.

But had my stories been discovered by school authorities in today’s paranoid climate — say, the one in which I imagined the intricate, Rube Goldberg-like demise of a hated teacher, or the one in which a seemingly happy and popular student unexpectedly lights fire to the locker room, with the football team locked inside — you can just imagine the response. Good chance the courts would be involved, as would the press, who would surely sensationalize the lucky prevention of another Columbine. Yet all I did — all I ever did — was imagine the worst, and put it down on paper. And in most cases, I wasn’t even imagining myself in the perpetrators’ shoes.

In his collection of short stories titled Shatterday, Ellison rails against the tendency of readers and critics to assume autobiographical hints, explaining that “writers take tours through other people’s lives.” Likewise, it wasn’t me who performed the horrific acts I chronicled, or who even wanted to perform them, it was my characters.

And in Roth’s The Ghost Writer, a character has tacked above his desk Gustave Flaubert’s advice to a young writer: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” This is advice that has stuck with me throughout my adult life, and which has been most fully realized in this blog, much to the consternation and confusion of my trolls and other readers who apparently lack the imagination and/or nuance to distinguish between the writer and his words.

At the time, I shared little of my most violent work, not because I feared how adults might react, but because I rightly feared that it wasn’t very good. (It wasn’t. I stumbled on one of my old notebooks a few years back, and found the stories to be overly ambitious and profoundly derivative.) But it never occurred to me that I might actually get in trouble for something I imagined; in fact I handed in the story about a teacher’s elaborate death to the teacher on which the main character was clearly based, and while he didn’t particularly like it, the only consequence I suffered was a rather middling grade.

“The safety of our students and the security of our students is our first concern,” said Teresa Wippel with Seattle Public Schools.

Wippel says the Seattle School Board voted yes for the measure so schools can respond to kids who may be planning something on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or by texting that will be disruptive.

But, what exactly is disruptive?

Wippel says, for example, a threat to fight another student after school, or bullying another student would be considered disruptive. But what if it’s a student saying something negative about a teacher? Is that free speech or is that disruptive?

“I think, again, that would be up to the principal to decide after he’s taken a look,” Wippel said.

So… is lovingly describing a teacher’s slow, excruciating death “disruptive”? I guess under the Seattle Schools new policy, that would be up to the principal to decide. In other words, hello Juvenile Detention.

But this new policy offends the child in me at a more fundamental, less paranoid level, for what is being presented as an anti-bullying measure is at it’s heart an assertion that children have no rights — no right to free speech, no right to free expression — even when exercised off campus. And since the determination of what is offensive, inappropriate or disruptive is somewhat subjective, individual principals will surely enforce this policy in a somewhat subjective and arbitrary manner… a particularly disturbing development in a world where so much speech now takes place online.

Take, for example, my own 13-year-old daughter, who has recently become an obsessive writer of fan fiction on a particularly bloody series of Japanese manga. She spends hours upon hours writing and rewriting new chapters before posting her work to FanFiction.net, where she is instantly rewarded with numerous comments and critiques. It is a medium that is as educational as it is gratifying, permitting her to hone her craft via constant and immediate feedback. I wish I had that opportunity when I was her age.

But what if a school official were to stumble upon her work and be shocked or offended by the violence she portrays, or the foul language that is common in the genre but totally inappropriate at school? What if the principal discovered that other students were joining in, writing reviews of my daughter’s fan fiction, and adding equally violent and foul-mouthed chapters of their own? What if the principal feared this activity was disruptive?

Fan fiction, like blogging, is an online, participatory medium… one in which you cannot engage without making your writing public. Surely I cannot warn my daughter to think twice before posting, out of fear of how teachers and principals might overreact, for how can any artist learn her craft while constantly looking over her shoulders? Of course, she can’t.

But that is the message the Seattle School Board is sending to all its students in enunciating its new, intrusive policy. It is one thing to develop policies to patrol and discourage bullying, but nobody benefits when these same policies are inevitably used to discourage free expression.

Yes, I know, the Supreme Court has repeatedly weighed in on this issue and determined that minors do not enjoy the free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment, and that yes, School officials can discipline students for expression that occurs off campus. But that doesn’t mean they should.

While I can relate and agree with most of what you e written here, I also understand the position of the school board and admin – if another Columbine or a lesser event such as a single bully-induced suicide happened under their watch and the Sound Times or KIRO discovered openly-available writings of the preps they’d be pilloried or worse. At best they’d have their lives torn out from them from lawsuits. Not being a parent makes it too easy to ignore this crappy situation, and I’m glad to have missed it in my youth. Their solution doesn’t work for me either, but lines gotta be drawn somewhere, and whereever they’re drawn some of us gotta cross them. I saw Harlan at a reading at the UW in ’73, and he was an amazing performer in addition to being a fine and unhinged writer. If you haven’t read The Glass Teat, it’s still a good bit of media criticism.

I also was in public high school in the 1970’s. The best description of my school’s attempt to manage students would be “stiffling”.

Under the guise of “saving money”, PE for guys was replaced with Jr. ROTC, complete with once-a week mandatory wearing of uniforms. When I was in the 9th grade, the dress code was no jeans, no facial hair, sideburns no longer than mid-ear, hair no longer than eyebrows in front, top of ears on sides, and collar on back. T-shirts, jeans, sandals, etc. were prohibited, and girls could only wear dresses or skirts, no higher than mid-knee level (which by 1972 were almost impossible to buy).

The principle reviewed every issue of the school newspaper, vetoeing any opinion columns or articles of any consequence, and leaving nothing else except a few ads, pictures of field trips, and the sports scores. Students wearing anything which advertised a political viewpoint (other than his own) were told to surrender it or be suspended (“too distracting”, he would proclaim. But Nixon/Agnew ’72 buttons were find.

In all this he was fully supported by the school district superintendent, who frequently voiced that students only had such rights as he deemed to grant to them. The same held true for teachers – any hint of union sentiments would get the teachers sacked for “insubordination”, as would any perceived criticism of him or the school board or school district. Even a teacher voicing political opinions which differed from his own would get a teacher sacked for “poor performance” – the principle and superintendent were the sole judges.

In consequence, teachers who found this intolerable either quit teaching or moved elsewhere to teach. Those who were left were cowed into submission and silence, and for the most part so were the students.

My mother was a teacher during all this, and I would hear her complaining to my Dad about these policies. And my parents were pretty conservative by most standards, but even they thought this was beyond the pale.

Thank God for the federal courts. By 1973 we had a federal court ruling which struck down the dress codes to the extent that they interefered with the student’s rights to wear expressions of protest or political views. Since hair length was deemed a political expression in those days, those were gone too. The court didn’t strike down the mandatory Jr. ROTC requirement, but it said the schools couldn’t enforce ROTC dress codes with respect to the length of hair. I still laugh looking at my yearbook and seeing all these guys in 1974 & 1975 with hair down to their shoulders, while standing formation and wearing their Class “A”s with overeas caps perched on top of their wild manes (it was especially funny when the guys tried to use bobby pins to keep the caps on top of an impressive afro).

Teacher’s ability to express a political opinion in their private lives didn’t come until they voted in a union with teeth and a three-week strike.

So by 1975, we were wearing mostly blue jeans, tee shirts, denim jackets, sandles or motorcycle boots, and had long hair, sideburns, and mustaches. But for some reason the prohibition against beards stayed, although it really only affected a handful of others beside myself. The girls couldn’t wear shorts, but besides that jeans and halter tops were the usual dress for them during the fall and spring.

But I was rather dismayed when I found my old school’s website a couple of years ago. After all the trouble we went to be able to simply wear what we wanted to wear, now the school has gone haywire in the other direction. The dress code doesn’t say what kids CAN’T wear, it only says what the CAN wear – khaki slacks for boys, solid blue polo-style shirts (with colar), the girls are the same except khaki skirts are substituted. Kids can’t wear hats, and sweaters or coats have to be kept in lockers during the day – unless it is an approved letterman’s jacket.

Very obsessive dark themes. And intense. I can’t read him anymore. Too much of a downer for me.

He was also quite a troublemaker in Hollywood. Wrote some award winning scripts for Outer Limits and Star Trek and movies that never got produced and some embarrassing ones that did. Producers like Gene Roddenberry used him all the time to write treatments and develop ideas. But he couldn’t bite his tongue when studio execs went stupid.

You can find the interview with Tom Snyder and some of the Star Trek cast on You Tube where Ellison tells the story of the script he wrote for the show and how Roddenberry made a mess of it – in Ellison’s opinion. Ellison and Roddenberry didn’t speak for 7 years after that!

I’ve seen him give a few talks. I remember one time he gave a talk at the Pasadena Library and he read a vampire story he had been writing for years. The characters were Jewish and the vampire was jewish as well. As he told that story, you could hear a pin drop in that room full of people. Then he suddenly stopped as the story wasn’t finished and the talk ended. The crowd gave him a standing ovation.

Ultimately, Didier will get offered something in exchange for a softening of his stance and Dino will save face and get the endorsement and it will be politics as usual. I think it was hasty of his office to announce that he won’t agree to the conditions so early. All he had to do was agree to the conditions, the same way other Republicans have in the past, then do what he wanted anyway. He could have done it all nice and behind closed doors, but his hand was forced to respond in public. Tricky to navigate. Should be interesting to see how Rossi pulls it off. There’s no way his big money backers would let him continue in this election with that many potential voters preparing to withhold their votes.

# 8: I think Rossi would have used that strategy (agree, then ignore) if he thought he could get away with it. But it’s a different electoral environment now. Even after losing in embarrasingly low numbers, the Tea Party folks are still determined to have an impact on the election – at least, on the Republican side.

So Rossi thought he had “threaded the needle” through the primaries, hoping to avoid making any controversial statements and still present more of a “blank slate” for the general election. But the Tea Party people aren’t cooperating.

These Tea Party folks aren’t the complacent rubes the Republicans are used to manipulating. They would insist that Dino stand up and repeat those principles every time he spoke. They wouldn’t let him get away with the types of salesman-schmooze generalities he has always tried to get away with in the past. They will be watching for even the slightest deviation from their orthodoxy.

But Rossi knows he has to be the “moderate” to have the remotist chance of winning in this state. Rossi knows the abortion issue is the third rail in this state, at least for Republicans. If he comes out strongly against abortion he’s toast west of the mountains, but that’s exactly what the Tea Party demands of him.

It really appears to be a bit like the politics in a number of parlimentary countries, where small but extremist parties hold disproportionate power because their support is needed to form a majority with which to form a government.

What is a bit surprising is the venom behind Didier’s spokesman’s comments. If he represents the type of people Rossi is counting on for support, it’s all over for Rossi.

@13 What he did sounds very patriotic to me. In a previous thread, klown, you posted that the primary mission of the Tea Party is to end deficit spending. In my response to that post, I pointed out the Tea Partiers did not object to Bush racking up record deficits to pay for (a) an optional war and (b) tax breaks for billionaires. Yet they object to Obama’s deficit spending to pull us out of the depression that conservative Whack-O-Nomics brought upon our country and the world! The only deficit spending they’re against is unemployment benefits for the people you guys threw out of work and job-creating spending. Now let’s review how the voters responded to the Tea Party agenda on Tuesday: Tea Partiers 12%, Everybody Else 88%. And any psychiatrist can tell you that of any given human population generally about 12% are clinically insane. Seems to be a correlation there.

I don’t know how much the world has changed, really. What HAS happened is that the platforms have gotten bigger for everyone.

You wrote a bunch of stories as a kid which were kinda disturbed. Lots of people did that. I did that. That’s fine.

In 2010 you are still as free to take a piece of paper and scribble whack stories and throw them in your desk as you were in 1985.

If your screeds had been photocopied in 1986, signed with your name, and put on every phone pole in the neighborhood, you’d be in the principal’s office. Take it to the bank.

Only… Photocopying stories is weird. And cost real money. So we never did it.

Now it’s free or nearly so. Facebook allows every fool thing I choose to post to be read by a cast of dozens. Your blog by a cast of thousands.

A lot of things have changed since we were angsty teenagers, and yes, the climate towards shooting your mouth off has probably gotten a bit more sensitive. However, in this case, the main difference is that now everyone gets their own little soapbox to spew with the consequences that come with that, which didn’t exist 20-odd years ago.

You are missing the point. Educrats really don’t care if they violate the Constitution, your silly laws, or even their own little rules. All they care about is covering their ass and keeping what is, for most administrators, a no-work job. And when someone gets sued, the taxpayer picks up the bill. So, like most public employees, there really is no downside.

If a museum is too noisy for you, go down to the headquarters of the Seattle School district. You can swing a dead cat down there all day and never hit any working person.

Well, I am a little older than most of you as I grew up in the late ’50s and all the ’60s. We had to be Stepford Children 27/7. And we received beatings from just about everyone who perceived we moved outside the straight and narrow. Those of us who read science fiction (loved Vonnegut and Ellison) were thought to be a bit odd but basically harmless. Still, we had “good family values” drilled into us and for the most part the adults around us practiced them.. So when years later we started to see violent movies and video games, we could play them for the fun of releasing our hostile emotions and went about our everyday lives none the worse for it. However, in modern day America, more and more parents do not install values they believe in. The kids see the hypocrisy and come to believe that anything goes. If you beat up a “ho” in a violent game, what must that feel like in the real world? And if all you see are violent movies, tv shows, and games, then it should not be hard to see why more and more kids have no social conscience. As a teacher who just retired, I find it frightening the number of students I had who just did whatever they felt because the Administration would just talk to them and no consequence was involved. If this behavior is happening in just a small number of schools nationwide, I shudder for the future of the U.S.

First and foremost, get control of your online activities by exercising your privacy rights and controls to limit your readership to friends only. Then make sure you only welcome real authentic friends into your sphere. If a school wishes to falsify friends, then they will be liable for any action they take and have to pay. It is the carelessness that the districts rely upon to garner access.

I would think that NWProf grew up in a different world than mine, though we are the same age and retired from the same professions. I was surprisingly free to wreak havoc on my schools and on my self. And though i was eventually expelled from my high school (as student body vice president even), that took a wild and crazy ride over two months of mayhem. I attended schools that NASA built in the late 50s/early 60s, and we, the children of the scientists and engineers, were given great latitude in our behaviors and demeanors. The small stuff that we did would get you thrown out in a heartbeat today.

Zero tolerance of nearly everything, makes schools just another caged institution in our society. The conflict between zero tolerance in some environments with open concealed carry weapons just outside is not a healthy path to the greater good. Up here in the Inland NW, and more so in Idaho and Montana, high school students drive to school with rifles in their racks. It is the nature of these environments, but the speech and writings (and photos) is of greater concern to schools. It’s nuts.

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